The DRM Debacle

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I spent a couple of days this week in Brussels talking with European
Commission people and other vendors about a bunch of things, but DRM kept
coming into the conversation.
Herewith some doomsaying and paranoia; the whole idea is broken and going
to cause severe damage and pain for content vendors, technology
vendors, and ordinary folks who just want to go on with life.

There are really two little mini-essays here: first a sort-of-positive one
about the impact on consumers, then
a blast of pleasantly-pure paranoia about
the downsides of DRM on the business desktop.

Most People Haven’t Noticed ·
The action here is intense and on a large scale.
On the content side, the conventional music business model has
been scrambled like an egg and the industry is trying to unscramble it;
the movie people are trying to be pre-emptive.
On the technology side, there’s the “Trusted Computing” initiative and the
Broadcast Flag and lots of work over in MPEG-land.
On the policy front there are torrents of US legislation already in place and
more on the way, while Europe scrambles to get a grip on the situation.

But out there in the real world, most people’s lives haven’t been touched
yet by DRM.
A lot of people are headed for rude shocks when they try to move
their music to their new computer and can’t, or try to send some video to a
friend and can’t, and a hundred other obvious things become impossible.

For example, while I was originally impressed by Apple’s iTunes Music
Store, it’s become obvious that buying old-fashioned CDs from old-fashioned
music stores is a better deal. The sound quality is higher, and what I get
is just a bunch of digital files that are mine and I can store
on any computer I want to and play on any device I want to and nobody’s
getting in the way.

What Do You Think’s Going to Happen? ·
We’ve seen this movie before.
My younger readers may find this incredibly weird but it’s true:
Not so long ago, it was illegal to buy a telephone.
You could only rent them from the phone company, which had all
sorts of good arguments why this was necessary to protect the integrity and
quality and viability of the telephone network.

Of course, those arguments were a self-serving load of crap.
Eventually, it became obvious that the standards were stable, you could buy
phones and plug them in without breaking anything.
The legislators swept those silly rules away and told the phone company to
shut up and deal with it.
And, oh yes, the phone business then experienced an explosion of innovation
and revenue growth.

Right now, we have the DMCA and its ill-begotten brethren; all foisted on
the unsuspecting public by
legislators in the pay of the music and movie industries.
They were able to get away with this because most
people’s lives have never been touched by this crappy, intrusive,
intolerable technology.
Eventually they will be, and despite the fact that Western democracies are
mildly corrupt, they are still democracies, and the people will one way or
another say “Make this stop!” and the legislators will.
At which point, the doors will be opened for another explosion of innovation
and business growth.

Business Too ·
There’s another nasty dimension to DRM that has gone mostly un-noticed.
Check out the picture below.

It turns out that the latest version of Microsoft Office comes with DRM
facilities. Isn’t that great? Now everyone can protect their
intellectual property.

Above, you see what happens when you try open a DRM-protected Word
document in OpenOffice. (Note to geeks: Interestingly, the way it works is
that the message you see is embedded in the document; Office 2003 is smart
enough to know this and look elsewhere in the file for the real data.)

Imagine that: by introducing DRM, Microsoft can lock out competing
office software from opening its data files.
Does that make you paranoid? It should.

ContentGuard ·
In a lightly-reported story, Microsoft and Time Warner are jointly bidding
to take over ContentGuard, a company that has some DRM products and a
great big patent portfolio.
ContentGuard has claimed
that rights expression languages such as XACML necessarily
infringe on their patents, and thus if you want to implement any
such technology, you have to negotiate a license with them first.

If the patent claims hold up, there can’t ever be an Open-Source
implementation of a rights language.
Does that make you paranoid? It should.